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Comment by silverbax88 | Hacker News Reader

I would point out that both TFS and Mercurial do the same thing (as does ClearCase, but ClearCase is awwwful), but with much less memory consumption on the local PC. Not trying to add snark (I upvoted the above comment), just adding that it's not a GitHub feature.

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> I would point out that both TFS and Mercurial do the same thing (as does ClearCase, but ClearCase is awwwful), but with much less memory consumption on the local PC. Not trying to add snark (I upvoted the above comment), just adding that it's not a GitHub feature.

Well, no, obviously it's a feature of Distributed Version Control Systems in general.

In fact, that's probably why OP wrote "This is why I love git (and distributed version control systems in general)" and didn't in any way claim it was a feature of GitHub?

And do you have some kind of reference for git being less memory-efficient (are you talking RAM-wise?) vs Mercurial or TFS? On its face its pretty hard to believe; git is pretty light-weight.

Git for large projects is not lightweight, nor do they claim to be. In fact, that's the basis of their philosophy - that they store full versions of the files as opposed to just storing the changes because data storage is considered inexpensive. The only time Git uses pointers in when the files have not changed.

I'm certainly not slamming Git for working exactly the way it was intended.

I think you may be thinking of a different VCS such as SVN as Git actually just stores the meta data (changes/deltas) and not full versions of the file in each commit.

As an example when you clone a repository, it downloaded it, then in goes through a process of 'Resolving Deltas'. This is it going through the history applying the changes/deltas to the files so that they are up to the most recent revision.

The only files that are added in full are binary files.

Some reading: http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Internals-Packfiles :)

To be fair, it uses the full blob until you pack, which is not immediately and depends on your settings. Large repositories spend a significant amount of effort determining optimum window pack sizes etc to optimise the packing of their history.

So, git can be quite heavy on disk usage, until all the loose objects are packed.

Pro-tip: when you want people to understand a comment you're making about the disk-consumption patterns of one piece of software vs another rather than memory-consumption, consider actually referring to it as "disk-consumption". Git is quite lightweight, if we're actually talking about memory.

Also, maybe don't confuse git with GitHub, as your original comment did.

Your comment looks just like snark to me since 1) the parent comment mentioned other distributed systems and 2) a random unreferenced jab at git for its allegedly bad memory consumption. I have no idea if it is true or not, but it is hardly relevant to the discussion.

Last time I used TFS it would take 5, literally 5 minutes to time out for checkouts. The way TFS acts I don't even feel it's accurate to call it a DVCS.

The only SCM I like less than TFS is SourceDepot. The bane of my existence. It's sad when I can rant about it abstractly and my father can sympathize.

Does TFS beat out ClearCase on the Worst SCM Hierarchy? I'm just curious; I had to use ClearCase a lot at a previous job, and hated it but I've never used TFS.

I've yet to have the pleasure of using ClearCase.

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